In today's market, there is a demand for high performance computing devices which use less power. One example is a mobile device that operates off battery power for listening to music, browsing the internet, or watching movies. Newer high performance hardware solutions, however, may consume more power than their predecessors. This is particularly true for emerging systems on a chip (“SoC”) and three dimensional integrated circuit (“3DIC”) designs. It is therefore helpful to balance performance desires with power restraints when designing new computing devices.
Hardware components, such as CPUs, may dynamically alter their frequency to balance performance and power consumption. Running at a lower frequency may reduce power consumption at a cost to performance, while running at a higher frequency may increase performance but consume more power. This dynamic adjustment is commonly known as Dynamic Frequency Scaling (“DFS”) or Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (“DVFS”).